Cinema is a language itself. It’s universally accepted, and spoken by most, whether you’re more of a fan of the visual or audio aesthetic. But within this world, we have specific and unique verbiage attributed to every film, and this adds an entirely new level of complexity. (Not in any way meant to be demeaning to the classic films of the Silent Era.) A film in any language can be distributed all over the world for other contemporaries to see despite their language of origin or upbringing. Thanks to subtitles you can have the opportunity to see Kurosawa, Kieslowski, and Akerman to name a few, but, are subtitles distracting? In other words, do they take away from experiencing the film as a whole, not to mention what we lose in translation?
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In a new video essay from Tope Ogundare for Fandor, he explores this paradigm by digging into a few specific examples of language barriers. Werner Herzog‘s 1972 “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” plays in German, but if you pay close attention you can see the film was shot in English. Due to poor sound quality it was dubbed in German, and though you can watch an English version, it was received better in German anyhow. A similar situation occurs with Josef von Sternberg‘s “The Blue Angel,” his first collaboration with Marlene Dietrich. Von Sternberg filmed two simultaneous versions that are nearly the same (also German and English), but the German version (if you get a chance to watch both) feels and sounds more authentic.
Ogundare gives other examples, including a defense for dubbing in the form of animated films, specifically Hayao Miyazaki‘s “My Neighbor Totoro” where the characters could be inhabited by any voice (thanks to Miyazaki’s demand for loyal English dubbing).
Can you only truly trust the image in a movie? A question to ponder over the upcoming long weekend. Do you have a favorite dubbed or subtitled film? Let us know in the comments below.